Sandy stole his first car a week after he received news that his parents had died. He didn’t actually know how to drive, but he taught himself, on the fly. He wasn’t sure what he planned to do with the car, once he got it going. It wasn’t like he could drive back to Cuba, and there was no one there for him, anyway. He was already beginning to lose his Spanish from lack of use. (The relief agency had assumed Hortensia Saldana spoke Spanish, but she didn’t know a word. Her Puerto Rican father had abandoned her mother, an African American, when she was a baby. She thought Spanish the language of demons and bad men.)
The cops pulled Sandy over five minutes after he got behind the wheel of his first stolen car. He was going fifteen miles an hour on University Parkway. A motivated young public defender told his whole story-how, Sandy was never sure, as he didn’t share it-and he was given a second chance. Hortensia Saldana was furious. She told him if he did such a thing again, he would be out of her house forever.
He stole another car the next day. To his disappointment, he drove for hours and no one pulled him over. Finally, he left the car on the side of the road, its tank empty.
He was content to do that for a while-take cars, drive them until empty, abandon them. Of course, as soon as he no longer wanted to get caught, he was. They sent him to “training school,” and, against all the odds, it worked. He got a high school education, found a friend and mentor in one of the teachers. He left and found a part-time job, a little apartment, his first and only girl, Mary. His juvie record sealed, he was accepted into the police academy. Hortensia Saldana, now frail and needy, reached out to him. He wasn’t fooled. He told Mary: “She’s mended her fences with me so I can mend everything else in that old house.” But when she died, she left it to him and he maintained it as a rental. Then he mortgaged it for the restaurant and-well, that was that. Remington was coming back. That was kind of a mantra among those who owned the houses: The area is coming back! He would sell it as soon as he was no longer underwater. But selling required more work than maintaining it for tenants, so he kept renting it.
It took him the better part of three days to ready the place, and when he sorted old mail that had accumulated there, he found a four-week-old letter from the city, claiming he was at risk of a lien because he hadn’t paid the property taxes. He knew he had paid online last August, but he wasn’t going to trust a computer to screw it up again. He headed down to the courthouse, as familiar as his home, assuming it would take all afternoon to straighten it out.
But the glitch was apparently systemwide and the weary-but-kind clerk immediately credited his account. With time left on his parking meter, he decided to stop for lunch, ending up at Subway, which made him sad. There used to be so many good lunch places near the courthouse, old-fashioned diners. Werner’s. The Honeybee. Now it was mainly chains and a few really dingy places. His heart sank at the sight of the menu board-no knock on the sandwiches, which were fine, but this was not how people should eat. Assembly lines were for things made out of metal and plastic, not sandwiches. Why wasn’t there a place in Baltimore to buy a simple, classic Cubano?
There had been. It was a restaurant on the Avenue and it had failed miserably because of its dumb-as-shit owner, Roberto “Sandy” Sanchez.
Then he saw Bert Gelman in the corner, eating alone. Hello, Smalltimore. But Bert was a lawyer and, as Sandy had just been reminded, there were only a handful of places to eat near the courthouse.
“Hey, Bert. Sandy Sanchez.” He offered his hand, then had an inspiration. “I appreciate you letting me talk to your wife the other day.”
Bert looked up with a ready impersonal smile. Guy had thick hair, broad shoulders-he had to work out to have that physique into his sixties. He was practiced at guarding his emotions. But Sandy had surprised him, he could tell.
“Ah, well, wives. They do what they want to do, one way or another. She didn’t even tell me what it was about.”
Uh-huh. She didn’t tell you at all.
“We’re looking at Julie Saxony. As a cold case.”
“Making any headway?”
“Some. You know what they say. If the original detectives did their job right, the name’s in the file. I tried to go counterintuitive on it, find a way it didn’t lead back to Felix Brewer. But you know what? It did. Circled all the way back to a horse trailer and two sisters, driving the guy to some private airfield out of state.”
“Interesting.”
Sandy’s only advantage was to charge ahead with what he knew, try to catch Bert without a story prepared. “Even more interesting is that Andrea Norr says you knew. You and Tubby. Knew Felix was going and when. Helped him get his affairs in order. Even got Julie a passport.”
In a case like this, you hope that the fucker starts talking right away. But Bert was a criminal attorney. He didn’t speak for a second or two, and Sandy knew he had lost this round.
“Now, Sandy, you know I’m not going to talk about Felix. He was my client and he remains my client to this day, with all the privileges. But I will tell you this much-the sister’s wrong about the passport. I have no idea what she’s referring to.”
“You could have forgotten. She said you did it as a nice deed, that you knew Felix wasn’t going to take her, but you didn’t want to be the person to tell her that.”
Bert shook his head. “Come on, Sandy. We’re not talking about this. I’m sorry, I can’t. Even if I could, I don’t think it would help you find the person who killed Julie. I’ve never believed there was a connection to Felix.”
“Your wife does, I think.”
“My wife is Bambi Brewer’s best friend. I think that Lorraine would like there to be-a point, if you will, to Bambi’s suffering. Unfortunately, the only point to the story is that Felix was a selfish prick who didn’t care about anyone.”
“I thought you were friends.”
“We were-until the day he left. It was a rotten thing to do. To Bambi, to their daughters. And, yes, to Tubby and me. You know how much time he would have done, in reality? Five, seven tops. Couldn’t, wouldn’t do it. He was that cowardly, that weak. I’ve never talked about it, though. No reason to have tension between the two families. Bambi needs Lorraine. Less obviously, Lorraine needs Bambi.”
“Julie’s sister told me something about a suitcase. That Julie took money meant for Bambi instead of giving it to someone, probably you. That would explain a lot.”
“I can’t speak to that,” Bert said. “I don’t have any knowledge of that. Again, I don’t have any knowledge about how Felix left. But my opinion? My thoughts based on a hypothetical situation about which I have no knowledge? It explains nothing even if it’s true.”
“People hold grudges.”
“Are you suggesting that Bambi Brewer decided, ten years after the fact, that she wanted to kill Julie Saxony because of some rumor about a suitcase?”
“Not a rumor. The sister told me.”
“The sister says now. Not then, right? No reference to it in the file, I’m betting. No, you open the case again, sister finally admits that she played a role in Felix’s disappearance, which is a federal crime, and-oh, look, shiny object, Detective. Go follow it. You’re smarter than that, Sandy.”
“Am I?” He wasn’t being self-deprecating. It was his way of saying: And how would you know? “One of the Brewer girls confronted Julie a week before she disappeared. Meanwhile, the sister said Julie was obsessed with Bambi, used to go around saying she thought that Bambi had Felix killed.”